timtom
Posts: 2358
Joined: 1/29/2003 From: Aarhus, Denmark Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Big B Very curious - does he give statistical breakdowns on losses, by date, month or week, circumstance, etc? Are there appendixes full of meaningful data? Negative on both. They're blow-by-blow accounts of seemingly every air action in South East Asia, one day at a time. This is both the main strength and the main weakness of the books. The narrative gets swamped with detail, much of which had best been presented in tabular form. The authors don't really get past narrative and on to analysis. There was clearly something very wrong with Allied air operations during the first months of the Pacific war, but Shores is isn't too interested in delving into the underlying issues, content to argue that Japanese succeses rested on numerical superiority in general and qualitative ditto in particular. The narrative suggests a near complete absence of C3 on the Allied part, allowing the Japanese to catch their opponents off balance time and again, while Allied responses were mostly feeble, uncoordinated, and piece-meal. While the Dutch and the Americans might be excused, after two years of war, the lack of "grip" on the part of the Brits is tantalizing. However this is something the reader has to infer on his own. I feel that Shores rather misses an opportunity to present a coherent synthesis on PTO air operations during this period, but it's clearly not his purpose. One great achievement is the crossreference with Japanese sources, showing the enormously inflated A2A claims of both sides for what they are. With special relavance to WitP perhaps, it is also demonstrated how the Ki-43 and even the Ki-27, at least in the hands of 1st generation Japanese pilots, performed very favourably indeed against 1st generation Allied aircraft, suggesting that the Zero bonus should be extended to all Japanese fighters - indeed the Oscar was typically mistaken for a Zero. A great if not indispendable reference work for anyone doing reseach on the subject, they are rather less succesful as general history, somewhat missing the wood for the trees. Btw, I got my copies off the local library, so I don't have them to hand. Could someone please tell me the distance and direction of P2 in relation to P1? Wondering whether it would warrant a seperate base.
< Message edited by timtom -- 8/26/2005 3:23:15 AM >
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